


Rinse and Repeat

by UnidentifiedPie



Category: Gintama
Genre: Angst, Emotional Hurt, Family Feels, Gen, Hurt/Comfort, kind of but not really
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-11-13
Updated: 2017-11-13
Packaged: 2019-02-01 19:13:44
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,145
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/12711204
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/UnidentifiedPie/pseuds/UnidentifiedPie
Summary: The dead shouldn’t come back to life, not as different damn people, don’t they understand how much ithurts?(Or: Gintoki and Shouyou; the forming and breaking of trust.)





	Rinse and Repeat

Gintoki is sparring with Shouyou.

The dojo is bright and warm, sunlight gentle on the old wood floor. It's nice, and Gintoki thinks that he's actually doing okay - feet sliding in automatic response to Shouyou's moves, practice sword slipping through the air to parry and lock with Shouyou’s. 

Then Shouyou smiles, and says, “You’re doing pretty good, Gintoki. Can you block this?”

The sword disengages so fast that Gintoki can’t see it, slipping beneath his defense, and-

And he thinks for a moment that Shouyou will not stop; just sees the blade whistling towards his neck, heart going to ice and chest filling with cold. He thinks, in a moment of terrible, perfect calm, with his heart gone something hot and cold in his painfully tight ribs, that he is going to die. (Years of fighting for his life have forced this knowledge onto him - missing a blade, letting it slip past his defences, means his death - and he is dead, he is going to die with blood spluttering from a gash in his neck and there will be maroon stains on the warm wood floor, sunlight bright and gleaming off dark red, his body crumpled and bloody in death-)

Shouyou stops (of course he does). The practice sword is just touching Gintoki’s neck, rough wood against sensitive skin, and Shouyou smiles - “That was a good try, Gintoki,” he says.

It takes a moment for his heart to start beating, two for his chest to come loose. He takes a breath and it is shuddery, shaky, and for a moment he hates himself for being so stupid, for ever believing-

-he clenches his fists by his sides, scowls. “Not good enough,” he says, and backs away, practice sword up and ready. “Let’s go again.”

(And ten, twenty, thirty bouts later the sword touches his neck and he doesn’t so much as flinch, just scowls and glares at Shouyou and says “Again!”)

 

-x-

 

“Your teacher or your friends, choose whatever you want.”

He is something like seventeen and the ground is tilting beneath his feet, gone strange and spinning. He is falling - and the world is coming apart at the seams, right before his eyes. His breath comes shaky and shuddery, and his heart has gone something hot-cold in his too-tight chest. There is sickness rising in his gut and bile clawing up his throat: he thinks, in a moment of terrible, desperate pain, that he is going to die. And he wonders what would happen if he turned the blade on himself, ran himself through instead of making this terrible choice. It wouldn't hurt as much as what he's about to do. 

But Shouyou made him promise, _Shouyou made him-_

He smiles and his chest comes apart, not so much loosening as _falling_ , splitting right in two. 

He can’t breathe - he lifts the sword and his hand shakes around the hilt, fingers gone bone-achingly tired. They're throbbing with blisters, and his grip is hot and sweaty. His heart and chest have gone dry and empty, vast and wide and hurting, hot with panic and cold with terror.

“Thank you,” Shouyou says- and oh _hell_ that is _the same smile_ , the one that he gave Gintoki every morning and night for _years_  
(“Good morning, did you sleep well?” “Stop fighting with Shinsuke and go to sleep, you’re a hundred years too early to stay up past midnight.”). And there is something _aching_ in Gintoki’s chest, making his fingers tremble. His breaths shudder and he-

He slices his arm through the air.

He sees the blade whistling towards Shouyou’s neck (he will not let himself look away). His heart is going to ice, his chest filling with cold. Something in him is haemorrhaging hot blood that burns up his throat, like a sword shoved through his windpipe. 

_Shouyou would have stopped._ Shouyou _always_ stopped-

(gintoki trusted him to stop)

-Gintoki smiles; eyes _burning_ , and his sword cleaves through the air, and

Gintoki does not stop.

 

-x-

 

And it is so funny- life goes in circles, he is standing back at the same place all over again. The same story told on a different tongue, the protagonist powered-up like in some cheesy manga with training arcs and random special attacks; except that this protagonist is Gintoki, is _weak_ \- this protagonist never powers up quite enough to win. The story is so simple (so stupid, so corny, so cheesy - rinse and repeat the same damn thing), and it goes like this:

Shouyou is smiling.

_Utsuro_ is smiling, but for a brief, ugly moment it is the _same thing_. Because he’s smiling that _same damn smile_ , and Gintoki wants to _puke_ , wants to be _sick_ because this is all wrong, this is a nightmare, he cannot breathe. It's the same smile that Shouyou smiled every morning and every night, that warm gentle grin worn over breakfast in sunlit dojos and bedtime stories huddled together by lamplight, and Gintoki _can’t_ do this, not again.

(He can’t do it again, for all that he sparred hundreds of times with Shouyou as a kid. For all that he once demanded more and more, again and again. 

This one time, he can’t. He wants to stop, he’d rather die.)

He is suddenly so tired. Everything aches, everything hurts, lungs on fire and heart frozen in ice. He tastes old blood on his tongue, his hand gone limp around his bokuto. The blade is cleaving towards his neck and it is the past in negative: light turned sharply to dark and wood twisted into steel, but the smile is the same and the style the blade is wielded in is so familiar that it _aches_. It makes him want to throw up and shut himself away and not speak, not act (not breathe, sometimes).

The blade whistles through the air towards his neck and Gintoki should _move_ ; but that’s sensei and sensei’s smile, and 

A million scenes play out in front of his eyes, warmth and laughter and “a hundred years too early"s, Takasugi’s laughter and Katsura’s smiles and Shouyou’s warm hand on the crown of his head. Something sick and hurting wells in his chest and eyes because this is the same person, the same face, same smile, same sword style- and the dead shouldn’t come back to life, not as different damn people, don’t they understand how much it _hurts?_

(he trusted Shouyou)

And there are these: a sword cleaving towards his neck and breaths stoppered in a too-tight throat and lungs _burning_ , lungs on fire, heart pulled apart in a million directions and trust still _there_ because Shouyou _always_ stopped, over and over until Gintoki _believed_ it, that Shouyou would never hurt him-

Shouyou - Utsuro - it doesn’t actually matter - does not stop.

 

-x-

 

(Kagura stops him anyway.)

 

-x-

 

Gintoki takes a breath, readies his blade, and gets ready to go again.

**Author's Note:**

> Fnally moved this over from tumblr. I'll move a bunch more fics over in the next couple of days/weeks. Let me know what you think of this? I'm still trying to improve.
> 
> God bless! Have the coolest day! :)


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